PSY 606 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Operationalization, Null Hypothesis, External Validity

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 606
• Professor: Jared Allen

Document Summary

"any research project involves a basic series of steps designed to obtain and evaluate, in a systematic way, information relevant to a problem. " First research must select and define a problem. Then a hypothesis, or a testable statement of what we predict will happen in our study, must be formulated. Next, the method for testing the hypothesis must be chosen and implemented. Once the data have been collected and analyzed, the research draws the appropriate conclusions and documents the results in a research report. To generate a hypothesis, we might ask, "what kind of evidence would support the idea that stress causes depression?" This predction that there is no relationship between the phenomena we are studying - in this case, stress and depression - is called the null hypothesis. Variable: a factor or characteristic that can vary within an individual or between individuals. Dependant variable: the factor we are trying to predict in our study.